Sublime

With its publication Wilson became, as Frederick Jackson Turner saw it, “the first southern scholar of adequate training and power who has dealt with American history as a whole.” Other reviewers shared Turner’s admiration for Wilson’s history, yet they couldn’t help but notice the author’s fondness for the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose missi

he wrote a series of historical essays and was among the first to depict Lincoln as “a towering figure, coping admirably with herculean tasks.” His perceptive diary, which he edited in his last years, remains one of the most valuable sources on the dynamics within the Lincoln administration.

The master of the academy, William Weatherald, had a major impact on the boy, implanting in him a love of literature and the essentials of mathematics and other practical sciences and fostering more than a little of the gentle religiosity of Quakerism.